Hayden Fry brought the sizzle and the steak to Iowa

His legend was built on winning, of course.

Without the three Big Ten championships and three Rose Bowl trips, without the consistent and colorful winning for most of his 20 years as the head football coach, the Hayden Fry story is just another footnote in University of Iowa sports history.

Instead, it was one of Iowa's best all-time stories.

The whole thing almost seemed out of the movies. A down-in-the-dumps football program gets a coach no one in Iowa knew, and he enters like a west Texas whirlwind with a language and style totally alien to the locals.

In his third season, Pasadena. And away the Hawkeyes went, with their football image forever changed.

But statistics are statistics. Games come and go, seasons come and go. There were many glorious victories, and some hard-to-swallow losses. 'The sun don't shine on the same dog's rump every day,' Fry said.

He came to a place that was desolate, football-wise, and brought an immediate pizzazz of personality followed before long by a football feast. He introduced Hawkeye players and fans to the concepts of looking like winners, thinking like winners, and ultimately, winning.

Blood and guts, Big Ten football? Well, like all good football teams, Fry's Hawkeyes were built with fundamentals, blocking and tackling. But they threw the ball in an era in which the forward pass was still a strange and hard-to-tame thing for a lot of teams in the Big Ten. What was this entertaining, effective thing that had landed here?

It was, to use another Fryism, a high porch picnic.

Yet, I'll maintain what the old Texan who was called 'Crazy Legs' as the quarterback of Odessa High's Texas state-championship team of 1946 did off the field was just as important and enduring here as all the triumphs.

You know that Tigerhawk logo that is omnipresent in Iowa? Fry commissioned that almost as soon as he took the Iowa job — which he got thanks to the foresight of recently deceased Bump Elliott, the athletics director who brought him to Iowa with the assurance he'd be given what he needed to be competitive there.

At the time, the Tigerhawk was this weird-looking thing that seemed a little kooky. That was 40 years ago. It stuck. It went on the Hawkeyes' helmets. It went on Hawkeye fans' hats, shirts, car bumpers, mailboxes. It even finally found its way onto the UI water tower.